Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela's Virtue

Faking It: Female Virginity and Pamela's Virtue Corrinne Harol "Female Chastity is, in its own Nature, built upon avery ticklishFoundation."1 Samuel Richardson's sentimental novel Pamela (1740) revolves around the repeated attempts ofthe aristocratic Mr B. to rape his servant, the exemplarily virginal Pamela. Mr B.'s pursuit ofPamela's body instigates the narrative, but the objective of the novel is the loftier (by its own standards) investigation of Pamela's interiority.2 The narrative action converts Mr B. from an admirer of Pamela's body into an acolyte ofher virtue and thus relocates feminine social value from virginity (and embodiment) to virtue (and interiority) . Epistemological dilemmas catalyse this shift from virginity to virtue and transform the narrative from a rape plot to a marriage plot Though the epistemological problems presented by Pamela's virginal body do not at first appear crucial to Pamela, they nonetheless shape the epistemological crisis—and generic resolution of mat crisis— 1 [Bernard de Mandeville?], A Modest Defense ofPublick Stews; or, An Essay upon Wlioring, as it is nowpractic'd in theseKingdoms. Written by a Layman (London, 1724), p. 49. 1 would like to thank the following people for dieir generous comments on earlier versions ofdiis article: Helen Deutsch, Jayne Lewis, Felicity Nussbaum, Leilani Riehle, Maeera Schreiber, and Barry Weiler. 2 Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740; reprint, London: Penguin, 1980). References are to diis edition. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 2,January 2004 198 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION around Pamela's virtue. Because ofits inconstant materiality, virginity presented a particular kind of epistemological problem during the era of the scientific revolution that constitutes an important context for Pamela. The hymen—a corporeal entity with a long-debated existence, which disappears as it reveals itselfand which is found only in a limited class of bodies (virgin women) and only in some nondeterminable subset ofthem—resists the kinds ofmaterial investigation called for by the new science. The very immateriality ofvirtue, by contrast, creates an altogether different kind of epistemological quandary in Pamela. Pamela's virtue, so unexpectedly extravagant for a servant girl, must be produced and proven for a sceptical audience that includes Mr B. and the reader. Pamela's epistolary accounts of her heroic attempts to preserve hervirginity produce evidence about her interiority and thus allow readers to evaluate her "virtue." While her virtue depends upon preservation of her virginity (while she remains unmarried), it ultimately transcends physicality: her virtue comes to represent the intangible qualities that make her suitable for the wildly implausible hypergamous marriage with Mr B. Scholars have long acknowledged that Pamela is obsessed with virginity and that epistemological uncertainty is endemic to its form, but no one has persuasively linked the two obsessions in the novel: virginity and proof.3 Other critics have argued that novels absorbed scientific discourse, but this article argues that the generic strategies ofPamela and its authentication ofinteriority result from the failure of scientific methods. Whereas the virgin female body confronts science with the limitations ofits methods, Pamela's virtue, paradoxically , proves more amenable to emergent epistemological standards 3 For more on the epistemological issues in Pamela, seeJohn Stevenson, "'Never in a Vile House': Knowledge and Experience in Richardson," Literature and Psychology 34 (1988), pp. 4-16; John Pierce, "Pamela's Textual Authority," Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7 (1995), 131-46; NancyArmstrong, Desire andDomesticFiction:A PoliticalHistory oftlieNovel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 108-34; Michael McKeon, Vie Origins oftlieEnglish Novel 1600-1 740 (Baltimore and London:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), pp. 357-380. Ann Van Sant's discussion ofthe "testing" ofClarissa by Lovelace is an important influence on the argument presented in this article, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). April Alliston (discussed below) links virginity to the epistemological strategies ofthe early novel, saying "die trudi about female sexual conduct ... remains the ultimate truth for fiction in France and England." "Female Sexuality and the Referent ofEnlightenment Realisms," Spectacles ofRealism: Body, Gender, Genre, ed. Margaret Cohen and Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis and London: University ofMinnesota Press, 1995), p. 19. FAKING IT199 than physical virginity.4 From this perspective, the heralded move of the novel towards psychological and moral investigation—and...